"I can add a little to your piece on ‘Very Puzzling Coins from Dublin'. These tiny silver medalets by the Dublin jeweller Edmund Johnson do occasionally appear on the UK market – a specimen is included in the portion of the collection of the late Barry Woodside, to be sold by Noonans in February. Johnson described himself as ‘Jeweller to the Irish Court' and his premises were at 94-95 Grafton Street, Dublin, and also at 46 Wicklow Street. He held a royal warrant under Edward VII, though Edmund had been active since at least 1863, when he took over the family business from his father, also Edmund; he won a bronze medal at the Dublin Exhibition of Arts, Industries and Manufactures, 1872. The Johnson business closed down in 1925."

So far the mysteries of Johnson's puzzles are intact - none of our readers has even hazarded a guess. Wondering if the answer may be in unscrambling the letters into a sentence, I tried some online unscramblers and Words In A Sentence generators and came up empty. Some of the words found within ASRWSROIOEHWUOMNEMPH include "horsemanship", "washerwomen" "whorehouses", "harmonious", "horsepower", "shipowners", "whisperers", "womanizers", "worshipers", "merriness", "shipowner", "earworms", "rosaries", "mourner", "poisons", "wieners", "heroes", "opium", "earns", "soars", "hens", "iron", and "snow". You might think a generative AI Large Language Model would make short work of this, so I asked Microsoft's Bing CoPilot to write me a sentence using only the letters "AETENVMTEFISIRISTSEALI" and got this:

Um, quite poetic, but wrong - that's way more letters than we started with. So next I asked, write me a sentence using each of these letters "AETENVMTEFISIRISTSEALI" only once.:

Better, but still not there - the letter count doesn't match (and all 26 letters of the alphabet aren't in the string). Maybe this is a dead end, but perhaps gives someone an idea for further experimentation. Maybe we're on track after all. -Editor

"I believe if any can solve the mystery of these pieces, they would be among your subscribers. I forgot to mention that the Columbian Exposition piece is listed in Eglit, E-215 [Columbiana: The Medallic History of Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Exposition of 1893 by Eglit, Nathan N - 1965]"